[development] Why is the Drupal File System relative to website root and not relative to admin/settings/file-system path?

[Jamie Holly]

There's also benefits to it being absolute. If my /files folder is 
becoming bloated and I decide I want to start a fresh files directory 
all I have to do is change the file path inside admin. All my old file 
paths will still be intact. Making it relative would then break the 
archived /files path.

If moving the file system were actually that common of an occurrence 
then I could see this being a big problem. But to do things like moving 
from a development/staging area to a production area a simple query does 
the trick:

UPDATE files SET filepath=REPLACE(filepath, 
'/sites/www.oldserver.com/file', '/sites/www.newserver.com/file');

User pictures:


UPDATE users SET picture=REPLACE(picture, 
'/sites/www.oldserver.com/file', '/sites/www.newserver.com/file');

This has never been a problem for me when it comes to having to move a 
file system.

Jamie Holly
http://www.intoxination.net 
http://www.hollyit.net



Ashraf Amayreh wrote:
> I don't really understand why the files are not just stored relative 
> to the files folder rather than the site root.
>
> That way, changing the location of the files folder would only entail 
> changing the file path inside the administration.
>
> When retrieving file paths the function doing that could simply call 
> file_directory_path() and append the filepath from the database. Isn't 
> this how it should standardly be dealt with, or did I miss something?
>
> AA
>
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Earnie Boyd 
> <earnie at users.sourceforge.net <mailto:earnie at users.sourceforge.net>> 
> wrote:
>
>     Quoting Luc Stroobant <lstroobant at gmail.com
>     <mailto:lstroobant at gmail.com>>:
>
>         Clemens Tolboom wrote:
>
>             Having a development test acceptance and production
>             environment it's a
>             drag when moving the production database and files to an
>             acceptance or
>             development environment.
>
>             One has to update the files database table and more tables
>             or do
>             trickery with symlinks to get the site running clean.
>
>             If we could make the filepath in the files table relative to
>             the /admin/settings/file-system path the real files are
>             relocatable
>             without pain. Just do a db load and a rsync to get the
>             files and change
>             the dmin/settings/file-system path.
>
>             What do you think? Did I miss something important?
>
>
>         On *nix you can easily workaround this problem by creating
>         your site directory as sites/sitename and adding the actual
>         urls as symlinks
>
>         So you get something as
>
>         directory: mysite
>         link: www.mysite.com <http://www.mysite.com> -> mysite
>         link: dev.mysite.com <http://dev.mysite.com> -> mysite
>
>         entries in the files table will always look like
>         sites/mysite/files/file.ext
>         and are the same for dev and prod...
>
>
>     And on windows
>
>     junction www.mysite.com <http://www.mysite.com> mysite
>     junction dev.mysite.com <http://dev.mysite.com> mysite
>
>     --
>     Earnie
>     -- http://r-feed.com/           -- http://for-my-kids.com/
>     -- http://www.4offer.biz/       -- http://give-me-an-offer.com/
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Ashraf Amayreh
> http://aamayreh.org